Randy Pausch’s last lecture

From oprah.com:

Randy Pausch is a married father of three, a very popular professor at Carnegie Mellon University—and he is dying. He is suffering from pancreatic cancer, which he says has returned after surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Doctors say he has only a few months to live.

In September 2007, Randy gave a final lecture to his students at Carnegie Mellon that has since been downloaded more than a million times on the Internet. “There’s an academic tradition called the ‘Last Lecture.’ Hypothetically, if you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students?” Randy says. “Well, for me, there’s an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, for me, it wasn’t hypothetical.”

A new couple, a new camera

I took a short jaunt to Seattle to attend a wedding, and for the occasion I had my new DSLR, a Nikon D40, delivered ahead of me.  The bride had asked me to help out by taking candid pictures, which provided the perfect excuse for a new toy!

I learned that it’s a bad idea to take on a new challenge (wedding photography) alongside new tools (opened the camera box a few hours before wedding preparations started).  Nevertheless, it was certainly educational, and I learned a lot by overdoing it: snapped 850 pictures, 250 of which were completely unusable, and tried my hand at individually post processing the other 600.

A smaller subset of the results are up on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/relgar/sets/72157606411864781/.  Tips or feedback appreciated; I think I used to get better final results with my point-and-shoot!

An unexpected coinfall

My main source of coin surplus works like this: 5 dollar bills – cost of coffee – laundry money = coin surplus.

It’s amazing how many coins can accumulate from such a formula, albeit over a period of time: 2,610 bits of metal that were a little troublesome to lug to the bank.

Thankfully, nowadays I have a coin sorting “bucket”, like the one below, to help out.  Since we haven’t reached an all-plastic society yet, I highly recommend getting one; I found mine at Staples (it’s not listed online strangely).

coin-sorting-trays

  • Go to Random Post

  • Recent Posts

  • Recent Comments

    Ressie Nuncio on Getting Dell 1700 laser printe…
    GJ on Slow XPath evaluation for larg…
    Osvaldo on Slow XPath evaluation for larg…
    GJ on Slow XPath evaluation for larg…
    GJ on Slow XPath evaluation for larg…